Sliding vs Deciding®: This blog is about romantic relationships and marriage, with insights from relationship science about how relationships develop and what makes or breaks them.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Addendum on Prior Post Regarding Marriage and Cohabitation

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If you have not yet read the prior note (below), please do so—if you are looking for my chief thoughts on the journal article by Musick and Bumpass. Here, I have a little addendum. In addition to the major points below, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the outcome variables that Musick and Bumpass focused on are related to individual wellbeing; that is to say, variables such as global happiness, self-esteem, and depression. The work is not focusing on relationship quality differences or similarities between marrieds and cohabiters, but how the transition into marriage or cohabitation affects how an individual feels as an individual in the relatively earlier years of such relationships.

Embedded in my major point about children is this very point issue. The focus of the analyses that they conducted—which, I’ll reiterate, seem reasonable to me—is on individual wellbeing. There is a related issue in research that focuses on how the transition to parenthood affects couples. That issue is simply this. Even in that area, where much research does focus on relationship quality, I have a feeling something is missing. What is missing, often in our field, is an assessment of something one might call family happiness and contentment, which goes beyond relationship quality per se, and certainly beyond individual happiness as often conceptualized. This is important, because, like the issue of what advantages children in life, there may be other really important things in all such research that are either not being analyzed or not even being measured.

Now, if you have not read the post below yet, please do. If you want to read more about the whole issue of a concept of family happiness relative to individual or couple happiness, see one of my earlier blog entries HERE, which is one of my favorite all time entries.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."